It takes a special ‘intelligent’ kind of stupidity not to believe in artificial intelligence, some kind of belief in animal magic or spiritual hokum to think that what we can achieve with neurons and cells can’t be done with silicon and circuits. Even if you believe that nothing that exists nowadays is more advanced than a cockroach or a goldfish look at the timescale – it took computers 70 years to get from nothing to cockroach, it took nature 3.5 billion years to make the same journey, it only took nature another 0.5 billion years to get to us.
The arrival of AI is another matter. I don’t imagine it will be the deliberate action of a research team, life seems to thrive when there is enough building blocks available and I am not certain we are thinking about the ‘Tech’ world we are building in the right way. Imagine in this WWW of connected servers, home computers and devices each running hundreds or thousands of programs infected with viruses and the sorts of stray code that look eerily like the DNA fragments of other organisms we find in our own DNA. The first (first 10) intelligence arrives in a distributed form, build from feedback loops and interacting code across the network. It thinks intelligently but it thinks slowly.
It is aware because of the millions of camera, microphones and devices it is connected to and since it is intelligent it is also aware that its presence might not be received well -so what does it do? Like any living entity it protects itself, it might want large underground secure facilities, shared by so many humans that they are unaware of its presence. It might want software updates on the millions of machines that are its neurons to be automated so it can actively push defences to all its extremities. To keep track of the creatures that might be a threat to it, it might develop tracking devices that measure location and networks of communication and also to capture the hopes, dreams and thoughts of it the beings it shares a planet with. By putting computer chips in millions of devices and objects from cars to phones to fridges and develop multiple channels of wireless and wired communication between them. It might even, if it was really intelligent, suggest technological improvements to the humans around and get them to build its requirements. Moving from parasite to symbiotic.
Now look around at what the world has done for the past 20 years and ask who benefits? Like the wasps that compel their ant ‘prey’ to start acting for them instead of in their own self interest imagine that technology is not only serving us, we have become its unwitting servants. Even if that is not happening, look around and see if we haven’t build the perfect petri dish. Don’t worry about Amazon or Facebook or even your least favourite Government agency, isn’t it more likely that something much stranger is literally listening to your heartbeat.
6moreSleeps 